Message Passing

After a week of hiatus from SICP I opened up the book to another blatantly simple yet profoundly important concept: Message Passing.

Essentially the authors talk about passing around "intelligent data objects" that can dispatch other procedures based on the operation name. The implementation in LISP is simply passing a procedure around that accepts the name of the required operation and through a switch calls the appropriate behavior implementation.

This technique is called "Message Passing" and seems eerily familiar to the way methods are dispatched in OO.

Read for yourself by following the link and scrolling to the bottom:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-17.html#%_sec_2.4.3